Ford’s Focus Edges Up on the Best-Selling Civic
When executives at American Honda Motor Co. in Torrance look in the corporate rearview mirror these days, they’re likely to spot a Ford -- closing fast.
Honda’s wildly popular Civic is being pressed in the U.S. sales race by Ford Motor Co.’s new entry-level Focus, whose European roots and fresh design are combining to capture buyers’ cash and critics’ raves.
Executives at the U.S. arm of Honda Motor Co. say it is a bad time to compare the two, as the Focus is a brand-new model -- introduced 13 months ago -- while the 2000 Civic is the last iteration of a 5-year-old platform that will give way to an all-new model in September.
But Honda has no trouble selling its current cars. Indeed, the company’s bad-timing argument ignores the fact that July was the best month ever for the Civic -- age be damned -- with 32,111 vehicles sold, a 5.9% increase over the previous July.
Through the end of last month, the Civic led its class with 199,685 units sold and a 1.9% share of the U.S. passenger car market. The Focus was in second place with 175,670 sales, good for a 1.7% share. General Motors Corp.’s Chevrolet Cavalier (1.4%), Toyota Motor Corp.’s Corolla (1.3%) and GM’s aging Saturn small-car line (1%) rounded out the top five.
With numbers like those giving Honda considerable bragging power -- and let’s not forget that in California, the aging Civic still outsells Focus by about 3 to 1 -- no one is knocking the car maker’s prowess.
The Civic’s reputation for reliability, value and drivability are nearly without parallel, and few industry watchers expect the Focus to actually outpace it this year.
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Still, Honda’s decision to keep the 2001 Civic looking pretty much like its predecessors in the face of Ford’s success with its edgy new design has raised some eyebrows.
“Focus is just hipper and trendier” than other cars in its class, says Wes Brown, an industry analyst with Nextrend automotive consultants in Thousand Oaks. “Just about all of the competition is feeling Focus’ impact in terms of lost sales opportunities.”
The Civic, the leader in the compact category, has been least affected. But as Honda prepares to launch the 2001 model, Brown and others see it as a vehicle that could suffer a bit by comparison, notwithstanding all the likely refinements that Honda will put in the new car.
The Focus “is a little sportier and is shooting straight for the younger buyer, while the Civic seems aimed at a more across-the-board type of audience,” says Jeff Schuster, senior manager for North American forecasting at J.D. Power & Associates, the Agoura Hills automotive marketing consultants.
Schuster is one of the few willing to predict Ford supremacy: His midyear analysis has the Focus outselling the Civic by about 20,000 units this year if supplies of the 2000 Civic dry up at the end of the model run.
But Honda is no slouch at managing model changes and rarely leaves its dealers with gaping holes in the supply line. And Ford, which delights in being able to boast of No. 1 status in any car or truck category, isn’t willing to stick its neck out and forecast a time when its car might surpass Honda’s.
The folks in Dearborn, Mich., do, however, say they are selling as many Focus sedans, station wagons and hatchbacks as they can make -- leaving open the possibility that they could make, and sell, more if they wanted to.
In fact, in a moment largely unheralded in the U.S., the Focus passed the previous champion, Volkswagen’s Golf, to become the best-selling car in the world earlier this year: 228,000 sales in 60 countries from December through April.
One wag has suggested that Ford didn’t trumpet the achievement here because it would defeat the Focus marketing message. After all, if it’s a car for the young and trendy (and, of course, the wannabes that no Ford dealer will turn away, regardless of age or nerdiness), then how could it also be the car that everybody, everywhere, is buying?
For its part, Honda claims to be aware of but not worried by the success of the Focus.
“Ford is trying some interesting things with their edgy design, but we’ve been extremely successful with the design of the Civic,” says Dan Bonawitz, American Honda’s vice president of corporate planning and logistics.
The same consistency that some analysts are now questioning “has helped Civic hold its resale value,” he says. “The market is littered with cars that started hot and then cooled. The challenge when you try to make a fashion statement is that fashions change quite quickly.”
Where Ford claims a median age of 36 for the Focus--a hefty drop for a company whose average buyer was born before the original Thunderbird was introduced in model year 1955--Bonawitz says Civic’s median buyer is a stripling at 29.
“It’s all going to depend on consumer tastes” and which company read the tea leaves best, Bonawitz says of the contest for top spot in the compact category.
Right now, Ford seems to have the momentum.
“The Focus pretty much redefined that segment of the market,” AutoPacific analyst George Peterson says of Ford’s world car--developed in England and brought to the U.S. as an early-2000 model last year to succeed both the subcompact Escort and the compact Contour.
Indeed, Ford set out to redefine the small-car segment with Focus.
Stung by the failure of its European-designed Contour to capture a king-size slice of the market, Ford’s top executives sought vindication with the new compact.
“A lot of people were saying after Contour that Ford just couldn’t make a small car, that we were a pickup truck and SUV company now,” company spokesman Bill George says. “We have surprised a lot of people.”
The Focus is reeling in the kind of customers most auto makers are fishing for: young, relatively affluent buyers picking up their first new car and, with it, forming first impressions of the company.
A hit product can make those buyers lifelong loyalists; a dud can send them running to the competition.
And despite a reputation for reliability, safety and refinement, a car that doesn’t appeal to the tastes of a buyer group steeped in the gospel of trendiness can be a dud to some.
“The Civic might just have become too ubiquitous for its own good” in the youth market, suggests Herbert Tay, West Coast leader for A.T. Kearney Inc.’s global automotive consulting practice in Costa Mesa.
Despite Honda’s disdain for trendiness, “the market at this level is fashion-driven, and evolutionary change doesn’t survive when fashion is driving things,” Nextrend’s Brown says. “ ‘How I look when I’m in it’ is important to kids now, because they are smart enough to know that with today’s cars, the value is there whether it’s a $10,000 car or a $20,000 model.”
Brown says Honda might also have hurt itself by eliminating -- at least for 2001 -- the lowest-priced Civic, the three-door hatchback.
Although popular wisdom says hatchbacks don’t sell well in the U.S., Ford began offering a three-door Focus in December and it has been selling well, especially among the youngest and most price-conscious buyers.
“By dropping its hatchback, Civic repositions itself slightly upward in the market, which could make it more difficult to attract younger customers,” Brown says.
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Honda, in fact, seems to be aiming the Civic at a broader audience at the same time Ford and many other auto makers have discovered the gospel of niche marketing.
“Ford really tried to target Focus very directly to small groups of diverse buyers,” said J. Ferron, head of the Detroit-based automotive practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “They rolled it out at high schools and nightclubs.”
Ford’s marketing effort these days, Ferron said, is “to increasingly address smaller and smaller subsets of this important [youth] segment.”
People such as Melissa Kaps, a 20-year-old college student and United Parcel Service customer service representative from Fountain Valley.
She took delivery of a black Focus SE sedan at Villa Ford in Orange last weekend--traveling 20 miles from home to pick it up because it was important that her first new car be black and Villa was the only dealer around that had one.
Kaps, who traded in a 1984 Volkswagen van, says she didn’t shop around much because, at $15,000 with air conditioning, CD player, automatic transmission and power door locks and windows, the Focus was priced right. She said she had noticed a lot of the cars on the streets in the last few months and liked its looks.
She didn’t bother to go to a Honda dealer, she says, because “all my friends have Civics, so I know what they’re like, and there are just too many of them.”
“Everybody has one,” she says. “And I thought the Focus was a lot cuter.”
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Times staff writer John O’Dell covers the auto industry for Highway 1 and the Business section. He can be reached at john.odell@latimes.com.
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On the Fast Track
Honda’s Civic remains the top-selling model in the U.S. in the broad “first new car” category, but Ford’s European-designed Focus is gaining ground quickly.
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1998 1999 2000* Honda Civic 334,562 318,308 199,685 Ford Focus ---- 55,846 175,670 Chevrolet Cavalier 256,099 272,122 145,529 Toyota Corolla 250,501 249,128 142,335 General Motors Saturn** 231,522 207,977 110,389 Dodge/Plymouth Neon 196,497 183,797 108,768 Ford Contour/ Mercury Mystique 178,112 174,018 ---- Pontiac Sunfi re 82,748 90,256 51,654 Nissan Sentra 88,363 63,134 43,503
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* Through July 31
** Excludes LS model
Source: Autodata Corp.
In Focus
Design: Ford’s “New Edge” styling, which combines curves and creases for a love-it-or-leave-it look. It features a tall greenhouse, or passenger cabin, for extra headroom and increased driver visibility.
Features: Five-occupant seating; CD player; dual front air bags and side-impact protection system; power steering; independent front and rear suspension; front-wheel drive; 2.0-liter inline-4 engine rated at 110 horsepower (130 horsepower for the upgraded Zetec version); front disc and rear drum brakes; air conditioning (standard on all but the base sedan and three-door hatchback). Special-limited production versions include the Kona edition, which comes with a mountain bike, and the ear-numbing Sony edition, with its 220-watt stereo system. An animal lovers edition, with pet restraints and other goodies, is in the works.
Target: Though there are a goodly number of fortysomethings driving around in them, Focus sales so far have achieved Ford’s goal of lowering customers’ median age. The average age of a Focus buyer is 36, six years younger than the average buyer of its predecessor, the Escort. More than 25% of Focus buyers are in the 18-to-25 age group, and 44% are under 35.
Pricing: The manufacturer’s suggested retail price ranges from $12,126 for the base hatchback to $16,236 for the station wagon. Add $485 destination and delivery and up to $4,000 in factory options, depending on the model. Most Southern California dealers order cars from the factory already equipped with air conditioning, power door locks and windows and automatic transmissions.
Fuel economy: The base engine with standard five-speed manual transmission is rated at 28 miles per gallon city, 35 mpg highway, by the Environmental Protection Agency. The more powerful Zetec engine with automatic transmission is rated at 25 mpg city, 32 highway.
